Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Try this experiment...

A bit of context: For the past few years, I have been fooling around with Chaos Magick, but have gotten serious about it within the last two and I have to tell you, it has made a positive impact on my creativity. I personally feel that Black Folks have outgrown Christianity’s current incarnations, and with this, I needed to find something else to address my spiritual void and Chaos Magick was it Also I felt like an intruder when I investigated the rest of the world’s major religions/belief systems. They seemed too closed, dogmatic and not as liberating as I would have liked. So I discovered Chaos Magick (but I am moving into my own personal form of magick and Chaos will turn into something different, for me). Back to how this has positively affected my creativity.

Being able to reach a state of Gnosis (clear mind, Zen, able to turn off all the shit bouncing in your dome) is a great doorway into your creative process. If you consider yourself creative in anyway, try the following experiment, paraphrased from Grant Morrison’s Pop Magick! It doesn’t matter is you sculpt, write, paint, play an instrument, this experiment will prove useful.

Sit/stand/lay down somewhere where there a several things competing for your attention: living room, kitchen, park, coffee shop and sit quietly for five minutes. Absorb everything you can. Then divorce yourself from the context of the surrounding objects. If there is a salt shaker, don’t label it as such. Acknowledge that something is there, but don’t name it. Don’t concretize it, because names and labels lock things into a form and its potential to be anything else dies. After you’ve chilled for five minutes, imagine that everything around you has a very important secret to tell you. This may seem silly, but trust me. After imagining all these different voices, express these voices. If you use a keyboard, a pen, clay or plaster, it doesn’t matter. Just give voice to these things. After this is done, attack your personal work and notice the difference. I guarantee that your creative life will leap several levels.

To boil it down a bit: This exercise is just like foreplay before sex. If you get right to the intercourse, it’s good, but over too quickly. But if you fool around for twenty minutes beforehand, the sex is that much better.--Shawn Taylor